On this day in 1916 Granados’ Goyescas premiered at the Met.
Richard Aldrich in The New York Times:
There is a short and lively overture. The [first] scene is of surpassing brilliancy; the gathering of people sings the joy of a holiday in Madrid, in a chorus of great tunefulness and verve to which the orchestra adds a brilliant figuration. Mr. Granados leans heavily on the chorus all through the opera, and writes for it with skill and effectiveness. The highly spirited chorus now changes into a welcome’ for Pepa, arriving in her dog cart; there is a new rhythmic impulse quite as irresistible as the preceding. There is characteristically insinuating Spanish melody-clinging a little to the Rosalien that perhaps are part of its nature-in the scene where the high-born lady arrives seeking her lover. This is indeed based on a Tonadilla, a popular song. The music of this scene is a remarkable tour de force in vivid color, rapid movement, and vivacious expression.
The intermezzo that preceded the next tableau is an interesting piece of orchestral writing, in which the composer has ingeniously made use of some of his most characteristic tunes with changed rhythms in transformations and combinations. It leads directly to the strongly rhythmed galliard with its insistent triplet figure that they are dancing in the “Baile de Candid,” the “lantern-lighted ball,” the subject of so much uneasiness, the scene of a rather obscure insult and the ensuing challenge. Here is more local color piled thick, in the dance music and the swinging choruses. The declamatory passages in which Rosario, Paquiro, Fernando and Pepa participate are skillfully treated, accompanied as they are by the constant pulse of the orchestra in the dance rhythm, interrupted only for a time, to close with a still more strongly marked finale, with a mocking solo by one of the men above the chorus and the dancing, in which now the fandango is performed.
It leads into an interlude, which prepares for a very different mood in the last tableau. Rosario is sitting in the garden of her villa and listens to the nightingale, whose song suggests to her pensive reveries about love. The long and sustained air is of beautiful musical quality, certain of its phrases being of much sweeping grace and poignancy. Fernando comes; and the same mood is continued in the succeeding love duet, similar in its general character. There is the brief interruption of the duel, and then Fernando comes back to die. The utterance of the two lovers rises to an impassioned climax, and the end comes in the orchestra breathing a pianissimo. Much of the music of the opera is already familiar to concert-goers of New York, though perhaps not to a large proportion of the opera-goers, through the performance by Ernest Schelling and the composer himself of the pianoforte transcriptions that Mr. Granados has also entitled Goyescas.
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Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
